General Election: Immigration

[ewx]

I’m in favour of it. I’ve got immigrant colleagues who are competent and personable, and have had for most of my entire career. I think that reducing skilled immigration would mean that the UK IT sector got less done (and that this is almost certainly true more generally, but I’ll restrict myself to my most direct experience).

More personally, my grandmother was an immigrant (of European descent, via southern Africa) which of course predisposes me to view the idea positively. (I suppose you could view Europeans emmigrating from there to Europe as “going back where they came from” although gvien her maiden name I imagine that her ancestors were Dutch colonists rather than British ones. So maybe that doesn’t count.)

I also read that Eastern European immigrants (specifically, those from the countries that joined in the EU in 2004) pay 37% more in taxes than they get back in public goods and services (the corresponding figure for natives is 20% less in taxes than they receive). These immigrants aren’t costing the rest of us anything - in fact, it seems, they are subsidizing us.

So it’s a unfortunate, for purely economic reasons, that the three major parties are all talking in terms of controlling, restricting and reducing it.

There’s a detail that they like to gloss over, too. Each time they talk about immigration they generally exclude EU immigration and move quickly on to non-EU immigration. That’s consistent with our treaty obligations, of course, but it seems to me that the upshot is that anyone paying attention is not likely to be satisfied either way: if they are opposed to immigration then they’re going to be unhappy that nobody is proposing to restrict a major source of it, and if they’re in favour then they’re not going to be wild about the restrictions that are proposed.

There are parties which don’t have this problem, but they’re not going to form a government any time soon.

As for Gillian Duffy: she’s repeating what she’s read in the papers (not very coherently, unless perhaps you think there’s some mystery about the geographical origins of Eastern Europeans). She’s the symptom, not the problem. And I’m perfectly happy with politicians being rude about voters in private, even if getting caught doing so is politically very unwise.

Comments

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Just listening to PM, and a vox pop chap has just opined "immigrants, they come over here, get given benefits and and houses. We don't get that".

It really seems to be common "everybody knows" wisdom that the system favours the foreign, even though that just isn't the case. This divorce between the reality and common view never seems to be challenged, either, and the more it's ignored, the more it become the established truth on which people form their views.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I think it only takes one example and people generalise that this is a widespread trend - evidently pretty much nobody gets actual houses any more, but housing benefit is available on the same terms to EU nationals as Britons.

My mother has taken against the whole thing almost solely because her best friend from college went and married a German and had three perfectly Germanic children. One of those children who I think is a couple of years younger than me has since decided to move to London to "start a career as a photographer".

She's been in London for quite a while now, and there's no sign of the career materialising - but Camden Council are paying £225 a week for her to rent a 1-bed flat, so she's muddling through. The Vox research is all well and good, but probably only tells us that most A8 immigrants aren't children or pensioners - which wouldn't have been too hard to work out from first principles.

Meanwhile, the cost of renting or buying housing spirals upwards, and the economy takes a double hit - to the public finances from the need to subsidise vast numbers of people, UK-born or otherwise, who can't afford their own housing, and to our competitiveness as wages and debt levels are forced upwards by that housing cost.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Those immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs and sponging off the benefits system...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

But but but oh noes Britishness multiculturalism COMMON SENSE!!!!!1

(i.e., I agree with you; as the husband of an immigrant, my wife is sometimes surprised by the anti-immigrant sentiment she sees expressed to her that's immediately followed up with "oh, but we don't mean you". While not all anti-immigration views are racist based on skin colour, depressingly many of them pretty overtly appear to be.)

[gerald_duck]

The people at the desks surrounding mine are from Malta, Kosovo, New Zealand and Finland; that's fine by me.

What's not fine by me is that demand exceeds supply in the housing market and everyone thinks the answer is to build more itty-bitty cookie-cutter homes around every settlement of any significant size then lend people ten times their salary so they can afford them. It's not fine by me that the existing transport infrastructure gets clogged and there's no room to build more. It's not fine by me that importing a large proportion of our food is inevitable because we simply don't have sufficient land to grow what we need for such a large population.

[(Anonymous)]

Some of my best friends are immigrants, lots of my colleagues are, etc etc.

But, well, for a start, non-EU immigration is already restricted. The daughter of one of my mother's friends has been fighting a long legal battle to have her Turkish husband remain in the country: even being married to a British citizen isn't enough to automatically qualify him for residency and work status, so there's certainly restrictions in place there. The question isn't to restrict or not to restrict, it's how to restrict so that you don't lose the benefits of immigration (unless you really do think that we should get rid of all restrictions, even on non-EU migrants)?

I note that you specifically pick on skilled migration: does that mean that you don't think that reducing unskilled migration would have as large a negative impact? Actually, reducing unskilled migration might have an even bigger impact, because it's all those unskilled immigrants who do the jobs that British workers, or rather non-workers, consider beneath them -- but as you don't mention it, only skilled migration, do you think that skilled and unskilled migration should be treated differently?

Personally, I don't find it odd, or think it in any way unreasonable, that if I wanted to go to America or Australia or anywhere else to live there are certain hoops I'd have to jump through, criteria I'd have to meet, and so on. Do you? And so I don't see why in principle it's unreasonable for us to consider doing the same. We may decide not to, of course; the conclusion we reach may be that the benefits of totally unrestricted immigration outweigh the problems*. But isn't it a discussion we can have?

* I assume we can also agree that the problems are not entirely caused by the unconscionable failure of the locals to welcome all immigrants with open arms, and that there are some problems inherent with the mass movement of people (along with the undoubted benefits)? You say Gillian Duffy is 'the symptom'; what exactly do you think 'the problem' is? Is there only one problem?

I found this programme very interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qh0zf

Now, answer honestly: Does the fact I say all of this mean that I am a xenophobe or a racist? Is it, in fact, racist to talk about immigration?

S.